Brushes and Bismillah: the calligraphy exhibitions of BRKM

At Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School, the annual festivals have long carried a quiet kind of magic, and one of the most distinctive features of these gatherings is the hand-drawn Islamic calligraphy that lines the school courtyard. Students of Hindu, Muslim and other backgrounds gather around long tables, reed pens in hand, carefully shaping Arabic letters into verses and invocations. The work is not decorative filler; it is treated as a serious artistic exercise, equal in standing to the choir recitations and the gymnastics displays that the Ashrama is also known for. Each year, a fresh set of banners emerges from the art room, ready to be mounted for the festival and admired by parents, alumni and visiting dignitaries.

For alumni scattered across the globe, including many who now call Australia home, these calligraphy displays are a touchstone. In the western Sydney suburbs of Lakemba and Auburn, where Ramadan night markets draw enormous crowds each evening, the sight of Arabic script painted with care on cloth and paper feels instantly familiar. Former students living in Melbourne or Brisbane often remark that the Ashrama's festival aesthetic anticipated the kind of interfaith visual culture that has since become a hallmark of Australian multicultural celebrations, from Moomba's lantern parade to the Lygon Street Festival in Carlton.

Roots in a quiet gesture of respect

The tradition began modestly in the late 1980s, when a small group of senior students proposed that the school acknowledge Eid-ul-Fitr alongside the major Hindu festivals already on the calendar. The headmaster at the time, recognising the depth of Swami Vivekananda's own teachings on universal acceptance, agreed. What started as a few hand-painted greetings on chart paper gradually grew into a full exhibition. Local artisans from Baranagar's small Muslim community were invited to demonstrate the use of the qalam, the traditional reed pen, and a handful of students took to the craft with remarkable patience.

The early banners were simple: "Eid Mubarak" rendered in gold ink on green cloth, or "Bismillah" traced across a sunrise wash of watercolour. Over time, the students incorporated more elaborate compositions, including verses from Surah Ar-Rahman and invocations of peace that resonated with both audiences. The practice spread beyond the art room, with the science club and the literary society occasionally contributing calligraphy panels to their own events, creating a sense that the calligraphic line was woven through the broader life of the school.

The young artists and their mentors

Behind every carefully lettered banner is a student who has spent hours, sometimes entire weekends, practising the slow arc of the alif or the looping curve of the seen. The school does not treat the work as a casual hobby; students who take up the calligraphy stream are paired with senior mentors, often recent alumni or visiting artists from Kolkata's wider Muslim artistic community. The relationship between mentor and apprentice mirrors the guru-shishya tradition that the Ashrama already values in its music and Sanskrit recitation classes.

Some of these young artists have carried the discipline into adulthood in unexpected ways. A former pupil who spent three years perfecting her kashida script now works as a graphic designer in Perth, where she occasionally volunteers to design signage for community iftar gatherings. Another alumnus, who once laboured over a two-metre scroll of Ayatul Kursi, found that the patience required for calligraphy shaped his approach to surgical training years later, where steadiness of hand is everything. He has written thoughtfully about career paths in medicine and how the visual arts prepared him for clinical work.

Festivals as living galleries

When the school festival season arrives, the calligraphy transforms from classroom exercise into something closer to a public gallery. The verandah of the main building is lined with freshly mounted scrolls, and beneath each piece a small card identifies the student artist, the verse, and the source. Visitors wander through the displays the way they might move through an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, pausing to read, photograph, and discuss. The atmosphere is unhurried, almost contemplative, even as the grounds beyond thrum with loudspeakers, food stalls, and the cries of younger children at the game booths.

A good deal of the festival's emotional weight rests on the pairing of visual art with sound. Alumni who work in audio production sometimes return to the Ashrama to help shape the soundscape of the unveiling ceremony, and one such former student has written about his practice of designing custom drum racks for the layered percussion that underscores the evening recitations. The combination of reed-pen calligraphy and carefully arranged audio is something the festival organisers have come to see as inseparable, and the response from visiting parents has grown year on year.

Conversations across faith and generation

Perhaps the most lasting effect of the calligraphy programme is the conversation it has sparked between students who would otherwise have little reason to sit beside one another for long hours. A Hindu boy learning to form the letters of "Salaam" and a Muslim girl rehearsing the same stroke find common ground in the difficulty of the work. The discipline does not erase difference, but it creates a shared vocabulary of patience, of mistakes corrected, of hours spent together with ink on fingers. Teachers report that friendships forged in this way tend to outlast the usual school-year bonds.

The model has parallels in Australia, where groups like the Affinity Intercultural Foundation and university chaplaincies in Sydney and Melbourne run similar interfaith art programmes. At Lakemba's annual Ramadan night markets, calligraphy demonstrations are now a regular feature, drawing crowds who might never have stepped inside a mosque. The Ashrama's version, run on a much smaller scale, has the same effect within the school gates. Students who have worked side by side on a single banner often become the first to defend one another against casual prejudice in the wider world, a habit that travels with them well past their final year.

Alumni carrying the tradition forward

Long after they leave the Ashrama, alumni find themselves returning to the calligraphy tradition, sometimes in unexpected settings. A former head of the art club, now settled in Adelaide, hosts an annual iftar evening at her home where guests are invited to practise verses onto long rolls of kraft paper, replicating the school experience in a grown-up key. Other former students, scattered across Canberra, Hobart and the regional centres of New South Wales, occasionally meet up for similar evenings that double as informal reunions.

A more formal channel for this kind of mentorship is the workshop on career choices that the reunion committee organises each year. Former students who once wielded the qalam now return to advise the current cohort on subject selection, university entrance, and the kinds of unconventional careers that a humanities background can support. The calligraphy exhibitions, in this sense, are not just relics of school life but a feeder line for alumni who want to give back, whether they finished their schooling in the 1990s or only recently collected their higher-secondary certificates.

The tradition in a digital age

The spread of digital design tools has changed the way calligraphy is taught and shared, but it has not displaced the hand-drawn practice at the Ashrama. Students now sketch their compositions on tablets, refine them digitally, and only then transfer the final version to cloth or paper. The school has begun archiving the best works on the BRKM Reunion website, where alumni can browse the exhibitions from Sydney, Toronto or Dubai without waiting for a postal copy to arrive. Several younger alumni have even produced short video walkthroughs of their processes, which are shared through the reunion's social channels and watched avidly by ex-students settling into new lives in Parramatta or Footscray.

What keeps the practice alive, ultimately, is the same thing that started it: the willingness of students and teachers to treat another faith's artistic heritage as worth learning carefully. The hand-drawn Islamic calligraphy at the Ashrama's festivals is not a token gesture, nor a one-off novelty. It is a sustained, evolving practice that has produced generations of alumni who carry the discipline of the qalam into medicine, design, education and the arts. For former students in Australia and beyond, the banners remain a vivid reminder of what the school has always stood for, a fair dinkum celebration of India's many voices rendered in ink, light, and the slow arc of a careful hand.